American savings bank - Middletown, ohio selects cocc for technology partnership

AVON, Conn., March 18, 2008 – COCC, the region’s leading provider of next generation technology services for financial institutions, today announced that American Savings Bank of Middletown, Ohio has selected the company for a long term technology partnership. The $34M bank will leverage its relationship with COCC to meet increasing commercial product demand while improving efficiency and flexibility in the face of tighter regulatory requirements.

“Our partnership with COCC will give us the infrastructure we need to concentrate on commercial lending and products that will attract retail deposits,” said Fred DeBiasi, President, American Savings Bank. “By converting our technology to COCC’s open, customer-centered platform, we also gain an excellent opportunity to reorganize our operations and prepare for growth in the Cincinnati-Dayton area.”

American Savings Bank has served Middletown, Ohio since 1889 with solid banking products and a strong focus on customer satisfaction. While the bank’s conservative lending standards kept it far away from subprime lending, the city and surrounding Butler County have been affected. DeBiasi sees the next few years as the time to prepare for growth, which he says is inevitable given the bank’s geographic location between Cincinnati and Dayton.

“When this area resumes its upward path, we will be ready with COCC technology powering a broader selection of retail products and commercial services,” said DeBiasi. “Remote data capture, new DDA accounts, more flexible loan options and online cash management for commercial customers are just a few of the products we will bring to market as a result of our partnership with COCC.”

DeBiasi said the remote data capture product is hot right now. “Local businesses know how they save enormous amounts of time when they process their check deposits right in their offices,” he added. “We definitely want to get penetration with remote capture.”

Greater efficiency will be another important result of the COCC technology partnership. Customer driver’s licenses will be scanned and available to tellers and CSRs. Customer profile screens will provide complete views of the products and services that each customer uses. The accounting staff will save hours each day by directly connecting to financial information via Excel and drilling down from summary to detail. OFAC scans and reporting will be automated. 

At the heart of these improvements is COCC’s advanced core processing platform that applies customer–centric processes to an open data model. The use of customer-centric processes greatly enhances a bank’s workflow, flexibility and productivity. The open data model enables a bank to keep all of its customer information in one place and to view that information as needed for each situation.

“Having all the customer information at our fingertips will improve our understanding of each customer so we can better identify opportunities to expand our banking relationships,” said DeBiasi. “The COCC platform will really change the basis of our service thinking from accounts to customer relationships.”

Beyond the technology is service. American Savings checked references and asked tough questions about COCC’s record with customers. The results were uniformly positive reinforced by customer ratings in the excellent range for the past five years. DeBiasi believes this is due to COCC’s cooperative ownership structure.

“Cooperative ownership really is the clincher,” said DeBiasi. “Any company can push its core technology onto bankers, but customer ownership adds another dimension altogether. COCC is truly an extension of the bank, and the people making the technology decisions are just like us. We have input into solutions, which has great impact on the quality of service. This is truly a partnership.”